Bill Readings - Introducing Lyotard

The surge of interest in Jean-Franois Lyotard's writings has pushed him into the centre of debate on the postmodern. His willingness to question the political and to investigate the intersection of art and politics undermines the charge that deconstruction has abdicated its political responsibility. This introduction, by discussing the entire range of Lyotard's writing, situates his interest in the postmodern in terms of a larger project of rethinking the politics of representation.

Bill Readings traces Lyotard's attacks on structuralism, Marxism and semiotics, contrasts his work with the literary deconstruction of Paul de Man and draws out the implications of post-structuralism's attention to difference in reading. The art of reading and the reading of art, as evocations of the difference of events, displace both consumer culture and Romantic nostalgia.

This book performs an introduction of Lyotard's work to current debates in Anglophone critical theory. All with an interest in those debates will benefit from the first truly introductory text on Lyotard. In addition, students with an interest in art, philosophy, and literature will find the discussion of Lyotard's writings on these subjects a useful point of departure for critical thought.

Bill Readings is Professeur Agrg in the Dpartement de littrature compare at the Universit de Montral.

General Editor: Christopher Norris,
University of Wales,
College of Cardiff

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F.R.LEAVIS
Michael Bell

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Elizabeth Wright

DELEUZE AND GUATTARI
Ronald Bogue

ECSTASIES OF ROLAND BARTHES
Mary Wiseman

JULIA KRISTEVA
John Lechte

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G.Douglas Atkins

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PAUL RICOEUR
S.H.Clark

INTRODUCING LYOTARD

Art and Politics

Bill Readings

First published 1991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
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11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

1991 Bill Readings

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Readings, Bill Introducing Lyotard: art and politics(Critics of the twentieth century). 1. French philosophy. Lyotard, Jean Franois I. Title II. Series 194

ISBN 0-203-00223-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-17415-1 (Adobe e-Reader Format)
ISBN 0-415-02196-0 (Print Edition)
ISBN 0-415-05536-9 pbk

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Readings, Bill Introducing Lyotard: art and politics/Bill Readings. p. cm.(Critics of the twentieth century) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-415-02196-0.ISBN 0-415-05536-9 (pbk.) 1. Lyotard, Jean-Franois. 2. Deconstruction. 3. Postmodernism. I. Title. II. Series: Critics of the twentieth century (London, England) B2430.L964R42 1991 9032992 194dc20 CIP

The twentieth century has produced a remarkable number of gifted and innovative literary critics. Indeed it could be argued that some of the finest literary minds of the age have turned to criticism as the medium best adapted to their complex and speculative range of interests. This has sometimes given rise to regret among those who insist on a clear demarcation between creative (primary) writing on the one hand, and critical (secondary) texts on the other. Yet this distinction is far from self-evident. It is coming under strain at the moment as novelists and poets grow increasingly aware of the conventions that govern their writing and the challenge of consciously exploiting and subverting those conventions. And the critics for their partsome of them at leastare beginning to question their traditional role as humble servants of the literary text with no further claim upon the reader's interest or attention. Quite simply, there are texts of literary criticism and theory that, for various reasonsstylistic complexity, historical influence, range of intellectual commandcannot be counted a mere appendage to those other primary texts.

Of course, there is a logical puzzle here, since (it will be argued) literary criticism would never have come into being, and could hardly exist as such, were it not for the body of creative writings that provide its raison d'tre. But this is not quite the kind of knock-down argument that it might appear at first glance. For one thing, it conflates some very different orders of priority, assuming that literature always comes first (in the sense that Greek tragedy had to exist before Aristotle could formulate its rules), so that literary texts are for that very reason possessed of superior value. And this argument would seem to find commonsense support in the difficulty of thinking what literary criticism could be if it seriously renounced all sense of the distinction between literary and critical texts. Would it not then find itself in the unfortunate position of a discipline that had willed its own demise by declaring its subject non-existent?

But these objections would only hit their mark if there were indeed a special kind of writing called literature whose difference from other kinds of writing was enough to put criticism firmly in its place. Otherwise there is nothing in the least self-defeating or paradoxical about a discourse, nominally that of literary criticism, that accrues such interest on its own account as to force some fairly drastic rethinking of its proper powers and limits. The act of crossing over from commentary to literatureor of simply denying the difference between thembecomes quite explicit in the writing of a critic like Geoffrey Hartman. But the signs are already there in such classics as William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1928), a text whose transformative influence on our habits of reading must surely be ranked with the great creative moments of literary modernism. Only on the most dogmatic view of the difference between literature and criticism could a work like Seven Types be counted generically an inferior, sub-literary species of production. And the same can be said for many of the critics whose writings and influence this series sets out to explore.

Some, like Empson, are conspicuous individuals who belong to no particular school or larger movement. Others, like the Russian Formalists, were part of a communal enterprise and are therefore best understood as representative figures in a complex and evolving dialogue. Then again there are cases of collective identity (like the so-called Yale deconstructors) where a mythical group image is invented for largely polemical purposes. (The volumes in this series on Hartman and Bloom should help to dispel the idea that Yale deconstruction is anything more than a handy device for collapsing differences and avoiding serious debate.) So there is no question of a series format or house-style that would seek to reduce these differences to a blandly homogeneous treatment. One consequence of recent critical theory is the realization that literary texts have no self-sufficient or autonomous meaning, no existence apart from their after-life of changing interpretations and values. And the same applies to those